


Inside the Noise

by scioscribe



Category: Thoroughbreds (2017)
Genre: F/F, Fantasizing, Masturbation, Orgasm Denial, Part Epistolary, Post-Canon, Power Dynamics, Sexting Via Letters, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-26 21:20:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21735571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: You weren’t the only person to write to me this week, actually.  I got another admirer letter, this time from a parolee in Houston who I guess just discovered how to use Google to search for female murders age 16-25.  It’s pretty obscene, so I’ll spare you the details, but there were a lot of details about the extent to and the ways in which he would lick, kiss, and generally eat out my pussy.  I wasn’t a huge fan of thinking about some sixty-year-old dude in a trucker cap going to town on me, but he actually had kind of a gift for erotic imagery.  Or at least for the kind of mind-numbing repetition you get into when you’re trying to get off.  So I imagined you wrote it instead.  That’s not something that you have to care about, but I thought you might be interested.
Relationships: Amanda/Lily (Thoroughbreds)
Comments: 15
Kudos: 135
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Inside the Noise

**Author's Note:**

  * For [xenocuriosa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/xenocuriosa/gifts).



> In addition to the tags: ambiguous pet/pony play, overstimulation, and cunnilingus.

“You look good in that color,” Lily said.

“Thanks. Not like I have much of a choice, but if something has to be mandatory, it’s nice that it’s flattering.”

It had been two years since Lily had last seen her, but Amanda hadn’t changed. Her face still had that same detached composure, and her hair still looked like it had been finger-combed and left to air-dry. But Lily hadn’t been lying. Amanda did look good in the soft, scrubs-like clothes all the patients wore: baggy pajamas in shades of oatmeal and cream. But it wasn’t the color. It wasn’t even the clothes. It was the way she looked like they didn’t make any difference to her. Like she could have been sitting opposite Lily completely naked and it would have been just the same.

They were in Amanda’s room, at a small, round table by a window that was bigger than Lily would have expected, even though it still had a security screen on it. Amanda had been telling the truth in her first letter when she’d said that the hospital wasn’t too bad. It was quiet, at least. They had privacy.

“Do you still smoke?” Amanda said suddenly.

“No, I stopped. It was never that serious of a habit.”

“If it’s not really serious, I don’t know that you can even call it a habit. Then it’s just a thing you do.”

“Yeah, that’s what it was. A thing that I did.” She met Amanda’s eyes. “Why do you ask?”

Amanda shrugged. “No particular reason. You just looked like you wanted something to have in your hand. If you’re nervous—”

“I’m not nervous.”

“If you were, everyone here would understand it.” She had a clear Solo cup of grapefruit juice, and now she pinched it on either side, like it was dough she was lightly kneading. The plastic popped back into place when she let go. “Whether you’re nervous or not, I’m still glad you visited me. I haven’t seen you since the trial, and I didn’t know if you got any of my letters. They say our correspondence is private, but you never know. Or maybe you got it and just didn’t answer. But I was surprised when you called to set up the visit. I’m guessing my mom’s not paying you this time.”

“No,” Lily said, although she wouldn’t be surprised if Amanda’s mom had tried paying someone else. It wouldn’t have been her, though: too awkward all the way around. “I got your letters. I just wasn’t sure what to say.”

“And now you are?”

“No.” She realized she’d been saying that a lot since she’d sat down, and she didn’t know whether or not it meant anything. “I just wanted to see you.”

Amanda studied her. She said, “Where did you wind up going to school? To college, I mean. I’m assuming you didn’t go to Brookmore.”

“Wellesley.”

“Women’s college,” Amanda observed. “Does that mean anything?”

“Like what?” Lily said, and then added, “You’re still a really hard person to have a conversation with, do you know that?”

“Yeah. Realistically I figure it’s gotten worse—I mean, pretty much everyone I talk to is either mentally ill or a psychiatrist, which aren’t exactly great barometers for small talk.” She took a drink. Grapefruit juice was shining on her lips, maybe stinging them where they looked chapped, and she said, “Effectively I was asking if you’re a lesbian. That whole summer, it always felt like—”

“There was something,” Lily said before she could stop herself.

Amanda didn’t even look surprised. “Exactly. Something simmering between us. I thought it was just the obvious, the part that we had right out there in the open, but then, that wouldn’t explain why I thought about you so often when I was masturbating.”

Lily’s face warmed. She could feel the long inner seam of her jeans, running up and down her legs, stitches laid against her bare skin like fingers. “I’d almost forgotten the way you just—said things.”

“Would you like me to be more tactful?”

“No, actually. It’s refreshing.” Like the juice, she thought, as Amanda picked up her cup again. Refreshing. Tart. Cold like ice. She wondered if Amanda was thinking of the roofied screwdriver. Maybe not. Most people’s salient takeaway from a cocktail wasn’t the mixer.

“So are you?”

“Yeah,” Lily said. “And you—do you even have a—”

“I can have preferences,” Amanda said. “I can choose between TV channels, order off a menu without thinking it all tastes the same. I probably don’t feel as strongly about it as most people, though.” She tilted her head, and that was the first time she really looked any older to Lily; her cheeks were just a little fuller. The shadows worked differently on her now. “I painted a picture of you.”

It was bizarre how much that intrigued her. She leaned forward, the laminated edge of the table digging into her arms. “Seriously?”

“It’s true but impossible to prove. I don’t have it now.” She finished off her juice. “We can only keep two paintings in our room, and I did a better job on the ones of Honeymooner, so I wanted to keep those. And anything else—without disturbing content—gets hung up in the common areas. That didn’t feel right for you, so I painted over it. You’d have to scrape off a whole weird night-sky scene to find what was underneath. And like I said, it wasn’t that great.”

Amanda leaned back, turning her head to look out the window.

She said, “To be honest, I still don’t get why you’re here.”

Lily swallowed. “Neither do I. It’s just—”

It was just that since Amanda, without Amanda, everything had felt unreal. College, girlfriends, her mother: all of it felt flat, compressed, like a perfume sample. Glamour and expense and quality that she could still lose inside her purse. What she hadn’t known before was how murder was like one of those noises loud enough that it made your ears start ringing and never stop. Everything else in your life took place under this hum, submerged and barely audible. Stuff didn’t register.

No one else in her life would ever matter as much as Amanda. They were the only two inside the noise together.

“I would still come up with your name,” Lily said. “If someone asked me who my friends were. You’d be the person I thought of first.”

“But I’m assuming you wouldn’t say it. That wouldn’t be very smart.”

“You really can’t just accept that I’ve missed you?”

“Well, before today, I never saw any indication of it,” Amanda said calmly. “So you’ll understand if I have to wonder if you have ulterior motives.”

“Like what? What would I possibly want?”

“Help,” Amanda said.

“Help with— _God_. No. Who would I even—” She couldn’t say the word. Both of them, more or less, had spent the last two years making sure that Lily would never have to say _I_ and _kill_ in the same sentence. Now it was like it made her stutter.

“I don’t know. It might be an acquired taste. I never really started drinking coffee, but something like that.”

“There’s no one,” Lily said. “There’s nothing. I just _missed_ you, okay? It’s that simple.”

Like anything between them really fell under that banner. No one in her life would recognize her right now, she thought, with a hot pleasure that opened up inside her like something coming into bloom. With anyone else, she was perfectly lacquered. Polished. A presentation. With Amanda she was messy and cruel and bitchy, and none of it mattered.

When they were together, she was her own portrait of Dorian Gray, showing every twisted, overripe flaw she could think of—and then she got to leave. Ditch the other, realer Lily in the attic and go back out in the world looking like she was just another pretty part of it.

All about her, of course. But Amanda wouldn’t be surprised by that. So even it didn’t matter.

Lily said, “I can write to you.” Her heartbeat was slowing down a little now. “That can start persuading you that I’m not, I don’t know, _asking for advice_.”

“I’d like that,” Amanda said. “I don’t have many people to write to. After the first year or so, I mostly weeded out the guys who just wanted me to send them panties and murder descriptions.”

“People really—”

“And worse. I used to be a hot commodity on the murder girl circuit, but I guess a prolonged cold shoulder turns even those people off.” Amanda got up and tossed her plastic cup in the recycling bin and then stood leaning against the cinderblock wall. “For what it’s worth, it does feel like we’re picking up right back where we left off. You’re easy to talk to, and you still feel familiar.”

“Are there people you can't talk to? I would have thought you didn’t care.”

“People can be interesting or uninteresting. And I don’t want to be rude if there’s not any reason for it. So most of the time I have to try to keep everything sounding totally innocuous, and it makes everything—antiseptic.”

“I get that,” Lily said.

* * *

_I have a film class I’m taking this semester. It meets at nine in the morning, so it’s a little like having class in a ghost town—or at least a town populated entirely by girls who look like me. You know, the ambitious, clean-cut kind—we might plagiarize but we hardly ever get high. We might do other things—things you’d know all about. I sit there at nine AM, hungover and watching black-and-white movies, the way we used to. I think you’d like noir. The women never really have to pretend they’re crying, and they get to wear the most amazing clothes._

_The really bizarre thing about writing to you like this is I feel like it makes me more likely to say something stupid or to say it badly. Because it’s not like I want to redraft it every time I fuck up, and if I just cross things out, or erased them if I start using a pencil, then you’re still going to see that I changed something._

_So I guess I might as well say it, at least to you._

* * *

_You probably noticed when you were here that I don’t have a TV in my room. They tell us something about how too much TV encourages disconnection and divorces our already fragile psyches from the real world, but honestly I think it’s probably budget cuts. There’s nothing about crocheting that fundamentally connects you to reality, but they have us do that all the same. I think in a couple of years, if I’m still here, I can contact the Guinness Book of World Records people about having made the longest scarf. Those books used to be in our elementary school library, but I don’t know if they even still make them. What’s the point when you just have the internet?_

_Anyway, I don’t get to watch many movies, but they do put TCM on in the common room sometimes. It’s mostly me and a couple of old ladies with dementia. What do you think you’d like to have your life be like, if you didn’t remember who you were anymore? Everyone always says they’d rather be dead, but fundamentally, in any sense of having selfhood, you’d be dead then anyway. What’s left isn’t you, just this thing that looks like you. And then every so often somebody props you up in front of the TV because they remember you used to like Humphrey Bogart._

_So that was happening, and we were watching The Maltese Falcon, which is good, so I had my mom bring me the book from the library. It’s nothing but Sam Spade from the outside, like you’re watching a movie all over again. It doesn’t say what he’s thinking or feeling. He just does things and says things and make facial expressions._

* * *

_I was thinking today about the time in the pool, at your house, when we were trying to see how long we could hold our breath. I lost control on the bottom of the pool, and you pulled me up._

_I looked it up, and it’s essentially impossible to drown yourself that way. I started inhaling water and choking on it, but pretty soon my body would have acted off a survival instinct and made me resurface. And since it was only about six feet of water, there’s no way I wouldn’t have made it in time. Most people who succeed in deliberately drowning have to weigh themselves down._

_That seems like the kind of thing you would have already known. Did you?_

_But I remember sitting on the bottom of the pool. When I opened my eyes, everything looked wrinkled from the ripples in the water. Like crinkly blue Saran wrap. I only kind of wanted to die. It was like wanting to die was secondary to wanting to stay down there, where there wasn’t anything. I wasn’t worried at all._

_Are they going to cut this part out of my letter?_

* * *

_No, I'm pretty sure they don’t read our mail. It never looks like they do, anyway, so I’m reasonably confident that everyone here is either ethical or uninterested. I just wouldn’t write the obvious, but I’m assuming I wouldn’t need to tell you that._

_You weren’t the only person to write to me this week, actually. I got another admirer letter, this time from a parolee in Houston who I guess just discovered how to use Google to search for female murders age 16-25. It’s pretty obscene, so I’ll spare you the details, but there were a lot of details about the extent to and the ways in which he would lick, kiss, and generally eat out my pussy. I wasn’t a huge fan of thinking about some sixty-year-old dude in a trucker cap going to town on me, but he actually had kind of a gift for erotic imagery. Or at least for the kind of mind-numbing repetition you get into when you’re trying to get off. So I imagined you wrote it instead. That’s not something that you have to care about, but I thought you might be interested._

* * *

“I’m interested,” Lily said.

“You could have put that in a letter.”

She could have. She could have saved herself a three-hour drive and a skipped class, too; she could have saved herself the money she’d spent on a new skirt that Amanda probably didn’t give a shit about anyway.

She knew why she hadn’t, but she couldn’t get herself to say it yet. Instead, she said, “They made a Lifetime movie about us.”

“Huh. They must have turned that around pretty quick.” She sounded no more than neutral, and it was impossible for Lily to tell whether this was Amanda letting her see the nothingness inside her, serene as the bottom of the pool, or whether it was just Amanda refusing to meet her halfway.

“You’re sexually obsessed with me,” Lily said. “In the movie. I reach out and befriend you, because I can’t believe there’s not more to the story about you killing Honeymooner. I think it’s something like I miss my dad and you were my friend when he was alive, so somehow you remind me of him.”

“That sounds a little too complicated.”

“I know. But I invite you into my life, and you start to think that Mark is mistreating me. Maybe abusing me. The movie gets wishy-washy on whether or not you’re supposed to be right, because on the one hand, Mark’s family—my mom included—could sue the living shit out of them. But on the other hand, they want to give you this little bit of righteous tragedy so people don’t write them up for doing one more psycho lesbian obsessed with a straight girl. Me, in this scenario.”

“So I kill him to protect you. Relatable but obsessive.”

“Basically.”

“And you’re the good girl. Do they explain what you’re doing home from school in the middle of the semester?”

That still stung, somehow. “No. They just set it during the summer.” She brushed her hair away from her eyes. “The acting is good, though. You wouldn’t go out of your way to watch it, but you might not turn it off if you were channel-surfing and saw it was on. Like that.”

“Guess I’ll take your word for it. Or maybe it’ll come up during our TV time. If they changed the names, whatever attendant they have in there might not remember all the details.”

“They changed the names. I’m Laura. You’re Andrea.” She could feel her blouse against her stomach as she breathed in and out; it was like a fluttering touch that never settled down. “There’s not a two years later coda on it all where Laura visits Andrea in the hospital and they fuck.”

“I’m sure the internet can supply one. But it doesn’t sound like it would be that much in-character for Laura. Not that the porn industry would care about that, particularly.”

“I don’t really give a shit about Laura,” Lily said.

“I just think it’s interesting that you came here,” Amanda said. “I can’t actually shut the door when I have a visitor, you know. It’s a policy, in case I murder you.”

“Right, but people must—”

“Probably. But that doesn’t mean I want to. And I think at least some of this should be about what I want, right?”

“Of course,” Lily said, before it occurred to her that this was some kind of trap. It was, after all, essentially Amanda’s style to wait for Lily to present her with some half-hearted, bullshit idea, so Amanda could then turn around and commit to it in ways even Lily hadn’t imagined. She could still remember the sight of Amanda gulping down the drugged screwdriver, the way she’d pushed the straw out of the way. _I live a meaningless life_ , she’d said. Lily’s idea, maximized.

Which meant she was about to get more than even she’d asked for. And more, probably, than Amanda had originally wanted to give her. That was just how they worked.

“What we could do,” Amanda said, “if you wanted, is something that accepts the reality of our situation. There’s a limit to how much you can touch me and how much I can touch you. But we can write whatever we want in our letters—we’ve more or less established that by now. So that’s a possibility. Another possibility is that you could finger yourself right here while I watch. Your back’s to the door, but I could warn you if someone was coming by, if it seemed like they’d see you.”

Lily felt a pulse of desire in her cunt. What was the worst-case scenario? That she would get caught and have her visitor’s badge revoked? That some burnout orderly would recognize her as Sweet Straight Laura and start tweeting about it?

She’d taken bigger risks before to get what she wanted.

“I’m not wearing any underwear,” she said.

Amanda didn’t even blink. “Show me.”

Lily scooted the chair back, listening to the little rubber stoppers on the legs squeak and grind against the linoleum. She set her knees apart and pulled her skirt up her thighs.

Amanda looked. The corner of her mouth twitched. “Gotta say, I thought you might be bluffing. But commitment was never really your problem.”

“Just empathy,” Lily said.

“Yeah. Touch yourself.”

Lily did, sliding her hand down between her legs. She let her palm rest on the waxed-smooth surface of her mound, playing her fingers against her labia without really opening herself up. She could feel the heat coming up off her body. When she finally shifted in the chair to spread herself out further and give Amanda an even better view, she slipped her fingers further down and started playing with her clit.

She’d had sex before, of course she had, but not like this. It was hard to keep herself from coming, and her problem usually ran in the opposite direction. She was so turned on she was fucking slippery from it, like her cunt was begging for this.

She said, “Can you hear that? Can you hear how wet I am?”

Amanda’s chin moved up just slightly. “But I said to finger yourself.”

“No, you said I _could_ finger myself.” Her hand sped up. She could hear her breath along with the messy, _filthy_ sound of her jerking off. She was panting.

“I figured maybe we’d established a pattern where I told you something was possible and you decided you were going to do it,” Amanda said.

Lily’s fingers curled up involuntarily. “I was thinking something like that, actually. Only it was the other way around.”

She had never thought before about being Amanda’s _femme fatale_ , all luscious black-and-white helplessness and calculating betrayal; none of it had felt coldhearted when she’d been in the middle of it. It sure as fuck didn’t feel cold now. She’d been a cheat and Amanda had been a killer, and they had both done exactly what they were supposed to do. They’d gotten twisted together, and now there was no way to get them apart. This close to orgasm, almost bare-assed against this stupid plastic chair, a hospital guest pass flapping rhythmically against one breast, she thought she liked it that way.

She kept her eyes on Amanda as she slid two fingers into her cunt.

“There,” Amanda said. She sounded completely calm, but Lily could see the way her hands were gripping the arms of her chair.

She only had to finger-fuck herself for another minute or two before she came, biting down hard on her lower lip to keep herself from making too much noise. She’d moved to lean too much against the back of the chair, and she was unbalanced and ready to fall.

She quickly pushed her skirt back down, trying to collect herself. She was sitting in a damp spot.

_What did I do?_

But she knew what she’d done. She’d meant to do it. Even if her first reaction afterwards was still to want to look to Amanda for reassurance, when Amanda was the worst possible choice for it.

Then again, maybe when you came right down to it, she was the best.

Because all Amanda said was, “Did you like that?”

“I think that’s pretty obvious. Are you going to—”

“Not right now. It wouldn’t really be as visually interesting for you, anyway, given the pants. But I’ll try to think of something a little more equitable.”

* * *

_This feels so old school. Sexting via the US Post Office. God._

_I had to get a drink, between that line and this one. Maybe it’ll loosen me up._

_What would you think, if I were here drinking a screwdriver? I haven’t had one since you went away. Do you want me to tell you if that’s what I have right now? Would that make you want to fuck me, the next time we met? Then again, I guess I’m assuming there that whatever neurons can get you pissed off are cross-wired with whatever ones get you turned on. If you’re only going to have two feelings, those aren’t bad ones to choose._

_I don’t think I’m this much of a bitch with anyone else, but maybe I just don’t know it. It’s just weird that I’m like this with you when you’re really the only person I want to talk to._

_I keep fantasizing about what would have happened if you’d just done everything I wanted back there in your room. If I’d been able to get you to do anything. I close my eyes, and I see you rubbing yourself. You’re naked, I can see your nipples and how stiff they’ve gotten. I can smell you. I always imagine that your cunt smells and tastes stronger than mine, and you don’t care about it at all. I want to eat you out, but I don’t, I sit there and watch you and I don’t make you touch yourself any way you don’t like. No, Amanda, I want you to like this just as much as I do._

_Then you come, and you look really good doing it—your mouth opens up like you can’t get enough air, and you keep grinding against your hand._

_And then I say, “Do it again,” and… you do. Even though you’re still all shaky from the aftershocks and even though your clit is sore. You don’t really want to, but I talk you through it, and eventually you come a second time._

_Then I tell you to do it again. And you do, Amanda. You’re so fucking wet that I feel like they can hear you out in the hallway, and you went too hard, so it hurts now, but you’re doing it anyway. You’ll do it as many times as I ask you to. I mean, what the hell, why not, right? I think you like that it hurts, even. You like feeling raw, used up. You like proving that you can do it, because you know any regular person would have stopped a long time ago. And your cunt is just RED from how long you’ve been playing with yourself, and your hand is stiff, and you’ve got tears in your eyes, no technique required. You’re all flushed up and down your tits._

_I want you to beg me to let you stop, I think, but you’re not going to, and I know it._

_So I just say, “One more time.”_

_Is that what you wanted from all this?_

* * *

_You asked if your last letter was what I wanted: yeah, basically. I like knowing what you think about, especially if you wouldn’t tell anyone else—and I’m assuming, unless you have some secret life as an internet pornographer, that all that qualified. If we’d managed to have some kind of quickie in my room, it wouldn’t have had a great rate of return on the investment. This does. I can reread this letter whenever I want._

_The theme of your fantasy, by the way, isn’t exactly subtle. I don’t feel, so you want to make me. I always thought sexuality was weirder and messier than that, but yours seems pretty simple—straight cut-and-paste of a basic emotional conflict. It gave me an idea for what to put in a reply._

_Which is this: do me a favor and don’t touch yourself for a week after you get this letter._

_I think that’s fair. You seem to like to think about me dissolving into a puddle of uncontrollable sluttiness—which is hot, I’ll admit—and I guess in return I want to take a little feeling away from you. A little gratification, anyway._

_It’s nice to think that I could be lying in my bed here, reading your last letter and maybe even imitating it, and you would be somewhere else, knowing I’m doing that and you’re—not. No matter how wet you get, you’re not._

_Of course you would, obviously, and I’d have no way of knowing._

_Do you remember that sleepover in fifth grade where we tried to bend spoons with our minds? I didn’t tell you this, but I got up in the middle of the night and went out back to the stables to see Honeymooner. It was one of those nights with a really low fog, and it made it so hard to see where I was going that I had to take the emergency flashlight out of the kitchen. I was barefoot and the grass was all wet from the fog. I got inside Honeymooner’s stall and put my forehead up against his when he put his head down, and I tried to read his mind. And I thought, maybe Honeymooner and I could switch bodies, and he could go back inside and be a person. He’d neigh, mostly, instead of talk, but he would probably learn after a while. And I would just be him._

_But it didn’t work, obviously. So it’s not like I’m going to read your mind either. There’s no reason to lie to me about it if you don’t do it, though. I like you better when you’re honest._

* * *

_You know, FYI, it’s a little disconcerting to read a sex letter that then trails off into you talking about how you tried to read your horse’s mind. Maybe separate letters next time._

_And this could all fit onto a postcard, but obviously I have to actually put it in a sealed envelope, because literally nothing I say to you is for public consumption, somehow, even me telling you that you can have your smug little nights of thinking about me doing nothing._

* * *

_See, look, I’m writing you two letters. It’s worth the price of the stamp, okay?_

_I remember the night you were talking about. I made up some of those ESP cards, too, the ones with circles, squares, triangles, stars, lines. I was going to do them on index cards, but you said the pen would show through in the light and then we’d never know if we were really psychic or not, so I drew on playing cards instead. Literally I didn’t think about this until just now, but we could have just used the cards the way they were instead of doodling fucking stars on them._

_I never knew you got out of bed to go see Honeymooner, though._

_You don’t have to answer this, but do you think you loved him? If you ever loved anybody?_

* * *

_All right, per your request, I’m separating out the sex stuff from the non-sex stuff. I’m not wasting the stamps on two letters, though. I’m just going to draw a line when the subject changes, and you can decide which part you want to read._

_Porn first, right? I feel like that makes the most sense, otherwise the other half of the letter just comes across as really unusual foreplay._

_I don’t think I necessarily have the creative writing skills to really drive home how much this last week has worked for me. I’ll be working on the world’s longest scarf or doing some kind of bullshit occupational therapy like beading a necklace, and I’ll think, “Lily can’t masturbate today.” And all of a sudden it’s like I’ve pressed right up against my clit without even moving a muscle. I play out the different variations on it sometimes. I actually think I’m more turned on by the idea of you almost breaking your promise, or half-breaking it, than I am by the thought of you keeping it, because I like to think of you actually starting to jerk off but then stopping yourself before you can come. It feels like you’d be even more frustrated that way. So I like that version the best and have probably gotten off to it the most. Sometimes you’re in the shower, sometimes you’re in bed. If you’re wearing underwear, I always imagine I can see where they’re soaked through._

_Based on how irritated you sounded, I’m assuming that this is, in fact, kind of difficult for you. If it weren’t, there wouldn’t be a point._

**_\-------_ **

_You saw the line, right?_

_In answer to your question: maybe. But it’s not the same thing as loving as a person. Horses don’t ask anything from you, and their needs don’t have to take precedence over yours, not unless you want them to. They’re there for you, not the other way around._

_I guess what I did, with Honeymooner, at the end, was me trying to be there for him. And it obviously didn’t out well, but I still think it was what I owed him. It’s easier for me to think about it like that than to get into some gradation of feeling that honestly feels irrelevant to me._

_I didn’t owe you anything, though. Not in the same way._

* * *

Lily wore a skirt again. No underwear.

“I’m thinking of taking some courses online,” Amanda said. “If I fail to go the Steve Jobs route, it’s not like higher education’s going to make me more appealing to the job market. Not given everything. But that doesn’t mean I couldn’t find something interesting. They say learning new languages keeps your brain from atrophying.”

“I’ve heard that.”

“What did you take at Andover?”

It seemed like such a long time ago that she had to actually pause to remember it. “Greek. And Chinese. You should do Greek or Latin—they have way more interesting introductory courses than any of the modern languages. Everything else has to be useful, so it’s all stuff like, ‘Hello, how are you,’ and the names of different kinds of fruit. Classics get you right into 101 readings about people burning alive back before there were firemen.”

“That does sound more appealing.” Something dark passed over Amanda’s cool eyes, like an unfamiliar shadow thrown up against a bedroom wall. Lily liked it. But all Amanda said was, “Your letters are always kind of short on slice-of-life. Fruit-buying, hello, how are you.”

“Hello,” Lily said. “How are you?”

“Just because I’m a little low on a present at the moment doesn’t mean you have to pretend you are too,” Amanda said. “It’s disingenuous. I don’t mind hearing about your life.”

“That doesn’t mean you want to.”

“I don’t know whether I do or not, if you ever tell me. Maybe it’s boring. Maybe you’re having cocaine-fueled orgies on a yacht. At this point I’d just be guessing.”

An orgy on a yacht would feel tame, actually, in comparison to the games she and Amanda had been playing. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that would be tame in comparison to her and Amanda, together again, as deliciously close as the red and white bands on a peppermint stick. Brittle and stingingly sweet. You couldn’t tell, in your mouth, which part was as red as blood.

Lily said, “I’ll tell you whatever you want,” and so, for the next hour, she did. She told Amanda about her classes. About how the campus had a lake that she walked around every clear day, even in the winter, and how there was a group of Russian grandmothers she always ran into there. She talked about the various weird cousins of Mark’s who had come out of the woodwork for his funeral: this cult-like mass of men between forty and fifty who all had the same skim-milk coloring and the same brand of polo shirts. She was going to get a saltwater aquarium once she decided to move off campus. She’d started to like fish—they reminded her a little of Amanda, actually, calm and watchful and devoid of the traits most people cared about.

Amanda abruptly said, “Do you sleep with anyone?”

“Not lately. You made sure of that.”

“Outside of whatever we’re doing, whatever I ask you to do in the letters, for the record, I don’t think I mind.”

“Why would you? After all, you’re the one who doesn’t even want to do anything while I’m here.”

Amanda studied her. “I could make an exception.”

Yes. Fuck, yes. She would have driven away without what she wanted—without the chance to create some ripples on the smooth surface of Amanda’s mind—but this was better.

 _It’s not the same thing as loving a person,_ she thought, as she let Amanda push her against the wall. She tugged at Amanda’s clothes, the fabric of them coarser than she’d expected. But Amanda’s skin beneath was smooth, and when Lily reached up underneath her shirt, she found Amanda’s breasts bare. Maybe Amanda had left her bra off just for her. Or maybe, being Amanda, she never wore one if she could get away with it. At the moment, Lily didn’t care. She ran her tongue over one nipple and then sucked it into her mouth, biting down harder than she would have with anyone else.

She felt Amanda’s body go rigid against her, and she smirked, stroking Amanda’s other breast with her hand until she pinched that nipple sharply too.

“You’re a sadist,” Amanda said. Her voice was strained. “That’s not the biggest surprise.”

“Sadist, control freak.” She dug her thumb against Amanda’s hipbone, hoping to leave a bruise there that would stay black and purple, vivid and fated as a birthmark, long after she was back at school. Amanda breathed in sharply, and Lily went to her knees in front of her, rolling her pants and underwear down and licking straight up into her cunt.

It was everything she’d always thought it would be. Amanda didn’t shave or wax, and Lily could see where her pubic hair had gotten darker from how wet she was, the blonde-brown deepening to a kind of chestnut.

Despite her intentions, it wasn’t the best head she’d ever given in her life. She was too rushed, too intent on getting Amanda off—feeling that quiver of Amanda’s cunt against her tongue—before they got caught. She got it, even if she’d wanted to tease her longer. Or have her go a dozen times, the way she had in the fantasy.

They wouldn’t keep Amanda in the hospital forever. Someday, Lily would get to spread her out in a real bed, and they could both do whatever they wanted.

“I’ll do you,” Amanda said.

Lily let her push her skirt up around her hips, and then she smirked at the look on Amanda’s face.

“I thought you’d like that,” she said.

Amanda brushed her fingers over the leather straps winding around Lily’s hips and then, almost tentatively, down the steel, the padlock, the burnished and padded plate that all rested against Lily’s cunt.

“Chastity belt,” Lily said. "I found it online."

Amanda turned her hand sideways, letting her blunt thumbnail slide into the little inlet of the keyhole. Her other hand stroked Lily’s thighs, which were streaky and wet—she’d been wet from the moment she had locked the fucking thing in place this morning, and eating Amanda out had made it ten times worse. Her touch was almost feather-light against Lily’s flushed skin.

“It probably wouldn’t be practical to let me keep the key,” Amanda said finally.

Lily almost laughed. “No.”

Amanda pressed against the part that shielded Lily’s clit, and Lily whimpered involuntarily, driving herself forward onto Amanda’s hand. Amanda shushed her, patting her hip almost soothingly.

No, not her hip. Her flank.

 _She’s treating me like I’m Honeymooner,_ Lily thought, and her knees almost buckled with how much she wanted that. To step in and out of that—of being the person Amanda hadn’t owed and the animal she had.

Amanda stroked her more, outlining the hard metal ridges of the belt, trying and failing to work her fingers around it. Whenever Lily really couldn’t help it, she made a little noise, or moved, and Amanda always repositioned her with the same matter-of-fact attitude.

Finally, Amanda rolled Lily’s skirt back down.

“Thanks,” she said.

Lily wiped her mouth off with the back of her hand. “And now you know I have it.”

“Now I know,” Amanda agreed.

They went back to the table and sat down, Lily feeling like she was being clit-teased every time she so much as crossed or uncrossed her legs.

“I don’t mind if you sleep with people,” Amanda said again. “But don’t make any of them a screwdriver.” The look on her face was so vulnerable, Lily thought, underneath everything.

She didn’t know if Amanda meant it literally or if she just meant _framing me for murder is supposed to be our thing_ , but either way, she said, “I won’t,” and she meant it. It didn’t matter to her whether Amanda was her girlfriend, her friend, her accomplice, her fucking sin-eater. It didn’t matter how Amanda loved her, or if Amanda even did.

Those were terms that didn’t apply to them. It was like talking about fruit instead of how it felt when you were burning and there was no fireman. No one except Amanda, picking up her drink and gulping it down, orange juice and vodka and Rohypnol and all. Quenching one need and igniting another.


End file.
